Accounting, economics, and handball

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Monthly Archives: January 2014

Richard Sherman has cause political excitement as a cornerback. Daniel Foster on NRO had a nice balanced piece. Paul Newberry wants to make it all about race. Anybody think that white America is a unidirectional thing?

Let’s make it about world view. Sherman is one of us. All humans are imperfect but he should be a conservative icon. I have no idea if he votes or how he votes but he is a conservative icon. He takes responsibility and makes good decisions about life. He made it from humble background (you know, the one that Wendy fibbed about) to Stanford. He changed position so instead of being an adequate wide receiver he became an all world cornerback. Even if he is the goat at the Super Bowl, conservatives should support him because, as he says, he is better at life than you are. His positive qualities are worth celebrating.

Back many years ago when we found college football interesting the was a saying about undefeated teams that went something like this, “I don’t care if they beat the Little Sisters of The Poor ….” This was back in the days when teams were judged on the whole season rather than the last game. It was an argument that it was hard to beat anyone every week.

Now, according to Paul Mirengoff, our current administration has lost one to that minimum standard of competence. We have just under three more years to go for the administration. We hope that the current administration will find activities beyond trying to beat the Little Sisters of The Poor and next administration will be a step in the right direction rather than what we see in college football.

We respect that the market wants college football be like college basketball where the first season is irrelevant other than getting into the playoffs. “We lost to them twice in the regular season, a third time in the conference tournament, but we beat them when it counted!” Yea??? We understand that folks could like playoffs because we like the NHL playoffs.

Michael Strain writing in National Affairs has a killer chart. It shows the employment rate for individuals age 25-54 from 1993 to the present. From about 2009 to the present is the only time the employment rate for folks in the prime of their careers has been below 76 percent. So although demographics might have an influence on the employment rate, by using ages 25-54 Strain shows that the employment rate is uncommonly low for the 25-54 age set. Eyeballing the data, the US is four to six percent below “full employment”.

Candidates for offices in the federal government need to have a plan for addressing the low employment levels. Strain provides one. MWG will go through his plan in a later post but the preview is that there is wheat amongst the chaff but there is a lot of temporary stuff and overly complicated stuff. MWG will provide an alternative that will mix in some Strain.

Kevin Williamson’s new book is thought provoking. One of the thoughts it provokes in MWG is competition in accounting standards. Why is one set of accounting standards better than two or more? One argument for one set of standards is that it is easier on financial statement users. A related argument is that one set of standards are easier for accounting students to lear. Perhaps, but if the standards are not at least as good then what is the advantage of easy? MWG is not aware of extensive research in this area. Some years ago the president (?) of the American Accounting Association tried to be provocative by making a similar point.

MWG thinks that we need to consider what arguments convince us that one world-wide standard setting body would make better standards. The history of large centralized organizations, e.g., US federal government, European Union, United Nations, should give us pause to consider alternatives. Will a single standard setting body be less bad than the current situation?

Earlier, MWG took the NYT to task for its reporting on academics and speculation. It is good to see Econbrowser and Powerline add their own details about the attempts to gin up a story. It presents a problem for the NYT because of the credibility they lost by taking a position that cannot be defended. Later when they take a more defensible position that X should be allowed to hedge but not speculate then it is hard to take them seriously.